MAY 1 SAT 11 AM GUILD THEATRE
31st STUDENT ACADEMY AWARDS REGIONAL FINALS
For 30 years, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has bestowed special awards upon films produced by students. Although some of the filmmakers have just barely finished school, many of these works rival in talent and production quality anything that Hollywood has to offer. The films selected in tonight's round of judging will join finalists from the rest of the country for the final selection and awards at the Samual Goldwyn Theatre in Hollywood. An opportunity to witness the next Spike Lee, Trey Parker, and Robert Zemekis—all former Student Academy Award winners—before they hit it big.
FREE ADMISSION

MAY 5 WED 7 PM WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
SUNDANCE CHANNEL FILM SERIES
IN THIS WORLD
UK 2002
DIRECTOR: MICHAEL WINTERBOTTOM We begin a monthly series of recent feature and documentary films sponsored by the Sundance Channel with Michael Winterbottom’s IN THIS WORLD, winner of the 2003 Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival. Born in the Northwest province of Pakistan, Jamal and a fellow refugee Enayatullah are young Afghan refugees seeking asylum in the UK and are the subjects of Winterbottom's compelling and all too relevant film. Joining the ranks of the millions of refugees who place their lives in the hands of refugee smugglers, the film follows Jamal and Enayatullah as they set out to travel overland to London, passing through Iran, Turkey, Italy and France, in a journey which is so arduous and life threatening that one is constantly aware of the desperation that lies behind it. Winterbottom and writer Tony Grisoni manage to strike a fine balance between the fictional and documentary elements of the film, harnessing the intimate and immediate possibilities of DV production. More importantly, through the individual stories, they allow us to peer behind the headlines at the human story and the broader political and moral concerns at stake. (88 mins.)
Sponsored by the Sundance Channel. Admission is free for Film Center and Art Museum Members.

MAY 21 22 23 FRI 7 & 8:45 PM, SAT, 7 & 8:45 PM, SUN 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
DIVAN
US/HUNGARY/UKRAINE 2003
DIRECTOR: PEARL GLUCK Anyone who celebrates family, history and culture (never mind what religion) will delight in and be inspired by Gluck’s witty and charming work of first-person cinema. To reclaim an ancestral couch upon which generations of esteemed rabbis and family slept, Gluck travels from her Hasidic community in Brooklyn to find her roots, and the heirloom divan, in Hungary. Along the way, a colorful cast of characters punctuate the journey and telling of the tale—her ex-communist cousin in Budapest, a used furniture salesman, a zealous upholsterer, a pair of matchmakers, a renegade group of fellow, formerly ultra-Orthodox friends, and a disapproving father who wishes she would stop with filmmaking and research, return to Orthodox values, and “just get married like a woman is supposed to.” “Charming! Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute.”—J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE. In Hungarian and Yiddish (with subtitles) and English. (77 mins.)

MAY 28 29 30 FRI 7 PM, SAT 7 & 9 PM, SUN 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
HUKKLE
HUNGARY 2002
DIRECTOR: GYÖRGY PÁLFI Almost impossible to categorize, HUKKLE is a poetic and delightfully comic murder mystery in the rustic Hungarian countryside. The almost-silent story opens on a weathered old man seated on an outdoor bench with a chronic case of the hiccups (the title is a play on that word) and features a cast of local characters and a bevy of wild animals, not to mention a fighter jet and a series of suspicious deaths. Pálfi weaves these naturalistic images and shots of everyday rural life, revealing the underlying coherence of seemingly random scenes of life and death. "TWIN PEAKS meets MICROCOSMOS”—Palm Springs Film Festival. “You’re in for an unforgettable experience, a microcosmic cornucopia of delights. The operating word for this movie is pretty much: Wow!”—WASHINGTON POST. European Film Award for Best First Film. (75 mins.)

JUNE 9 WED 7 PM guild theatre
SUNDANCE CHANNEL FILM SERIES
GINGER & CINNAMON (SAY IT WITH WORDS)
ITALY 2003
DIRECTOR: DANIELE LUCHETTI Looking for a getaway, from her routine and also somewhat from her longtime boyfriend Andrea, Stefania takes off on holiday to Greece. What she wasn't expecting is that her 14-year-old niece, Megghy, has decided to tag along, determined to make hers a summer vacation to remember. Luchetti, working from a screenplay by Stefania Montorsi (who also plays Stefania in the film), offers a wry and revealing look at the dreams, illusions and realities of love and romance as they play across very different generations. A light-hearted “comedy-of errors” set on the Greek island of Los, GINGER & CINNAMON is “made up of chatter and misunderstandings, myths, sweets, sun rashes, Homeric questions, fixations, broken diets, antihistamines, and messages of love. . ." —Stefania Montorsi. (105 mins.)
Sponsored by the Sundance Channel. Admission is free for Film Center and Art Museum Members.

JUNE 11 12 13 FRI 7 & 8:45 PM, SAT 7 & 8:45, SUN 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
BIG ANIMAL
POLAND 2001
DIRECTOR: JERZY STUHR In the 1970s, at the height of political oppression in Poland, the late Krzysztof Kieslowski (THE DECALOGUE, RED, WHITE, BLUE) wrote this wry, subversive commentary on the perils of offbeat behavior and the paranoid intolerance of those who always conform. Zygmut Sawicki (Jerzy Stuhr) is a small-town bank clerk who one day finds a camel, escaped from a circus, in his garden. He and his wife soon love the camel, as do the townsfolk. But soon the community starts getting tired and suspicious of the animal, becoming hostile when various schemes to make money off the "attraction" are flatly refused by Zygmut. So the Sawicki family bears the brunt of ostracism until the camel takes matters into his own. . . hands. "Can someone love. . .a camel? By choosing something that isn't understood by normal standards, we bring upon ourselves loneliness, ill feeling and anger of others. This film shows how intolerance is bred." —Jerzy Stuhr. “A gentle, comic fable about the price of individuality and the value of dignity.” —VARIETY. (75 mins).

JUNE 18 19 20 FRI 7 PM, SAT 7 PM, SUN 7PM
GUILD THEATRE
MILLENNIUM MAMBO
TAIWAN/FRANCE 2001
DIRECTOR: HOU HSIAO-HSIEN Winner of the Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, MILLENNIUM MAMBO is a piercing record of the quickly shifting lifestyles of an increasingly modern world. At the turn of the millennium, youth culture in Taipei is a techno-driven world of dark nightclubs, cramped apartments, nonstop smoking, and volatile relationships. Vicky is a beautiful woman whose difficult boyfriend contributes to the claustrophobia and alienation that pervade this urban story. Unfolding in shards of memory, Hsiao-hsien’s (FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI, CITY OF SADNESS) vibrant, mesmerizing film, shot by Mark Lee Ping-bing (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE), captures the brilliant flash and utter fragility of youth on the edge of adulthood. "Startling. Delirious, tangy sexiness."—Elvis Mitchell, THE NEW YORK TIMES. “ONE OF THE TOP 10 FILMS OF THE YEAR”— VILLAGE VOICE Critics Poll, 2003. (119 mins.)

JUNE 25 26 27 FRI 7 PM, SAT 7 & 9 PM, SUN 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
HOW TO DRAW A BUNNY
US 2002
DIRECTOR: JOHN W. WALTER “A portrait of Beat artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995), whose life and death—and all the art that came in between—made him ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist” —NEW YORK TIMES. An enigmatic, whimsical latter-day Dadaist, collagist extraordinaire, and the father of mail art, Johnson amused and astounded his who’s-who-in-the-art-world list of friends. HOW TO DRAW A BUNNY fashions a biographical mystery from fascinating, often hilarious stories told by Johnson’s contemporaries, including Christo, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Judith Malina, Richard Feigen, James Rosenquist, and the Sag Harbor detective who investigated his mysterious 1995 death. With original music written and performed by Max Roach.”—Film Forum. (90 mins.)